1967 AND AFTERWARD

By the spring of 1967, Nasser's waning prestige, escalating
Syrian-Israeli tensions, and the emergence of Levi Eshkol as prime
minister set the stage for the third Arab-Israeli war. Throughout the
1950s and early 1960s, Nasser was the fulcrum of Arab politics. Nasser's
success, however, was shortlived; his union with Syria fell apart, a
revolutionary government in Iraq proved to be a competitor for power,
and Egypt became embroiled in a debilitating civil war in Yemen. After
1964, when Israel began diverting waters (of the Jordan River)
originating in the Golan Heights for its new National Water Carrier,
Syria built its own diverting facility, which the IDF frequently
attacked. Finally, in 1963, Ben-Gurion stepped down and the more
cautious Levi Eshkol became prime minister, giving the impression that
Israel would be less willing to engage the Arab world in hostilities.

On April 6, 1967, Israeli jet fighters shot down six Syrian planes
over the Golan Heights, which led to a further escalation of
Israeli-Syrian tensions. The Soviet Union, wanting to involve Egypt as a
deterrent to an Israeli initiative against Syria, misinformed Nasser on
May 13 that the Israelis were planning to attack Syria on May 17 and
that they had already concentrated eleven to thirteen brigades on the
Syrian border for this purpose. In response Nasser put his armed forces
in a state of maximum alert, sent combat troops into Sinai, notified UN
Secretary General U Thant of his decision "to terminate the
existence of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) on United Arab
Republic (UAR) soil and in the Gaza Strip," and announced the
closure of the Strait of Tiran.

The Eshkol government, to avoid the international pressure that
forced Israel to retreat in 1956, sent Foreign Minister Abba Eban to
Europe and the United States to convince Western leaders to pressure
Nasser into reversing his course. In Israel, Eshkol's diplomatic waiting
game and Nasser's threatening rhetoric created a somber mood. To
reassure the public, Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1956 Sinai Campaign,
was appointed minister of defense and a National Unity Government was
formed, which for the first time included Begin's Herut Party, the
dominant element in Gahal.

The actual fighting was over almost before it began; the Israeli Air
Corps on June 5 destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian Air Force on the
ground. King Hussein of Jordan, misinformed by Nasser about Egyptian
losses, authorized Jordanian artillery to fire on Jerusalem.
Subsequently, both the Jordanians in the east and the Syrians in the
north were quickly defeated.

The June 1967 War was a watershed event in the history of Israel and
the Middle East. After only six days of fighting, Israel had radically
altered the political map of the region. By June 13, Israeli forces had
captured the Golan Heights from Syria, Sinai and the Gaza Strip from
Egypt, and all of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The new
territories more than doubled the size of pre1967 Israel, placing under
Israel's control more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs. In Israel, the
ease of the victory, the expansion of the state's territory, and the
reuniting of Jerusalem, the holiest place in Judaism, permanently
altered political discourse. In the Arab camp, the war significantly
weakened Nasserism, and led to the emergence of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) as the leading representative of the Palestinian
people and effective player in Arab politics.

The heroic performance of the IDF and especially the capture of
Jerusalem unleashed a wave of religious nationalism throughout Israel.
The war was widely viewed in Israel as a vindication of political
Zionism; the defenseless Jew of the shtetl (the typical Jewish
town or village of the Pale of Settlement), oppressed by the tsar and
slaughtered by the Nazis, had become the courageous soldier of the IDF,
who in the face of Arab hostility and superpower apathy had won a
miraculous victory. After 2,000 years of exile, the Jews now possessed
all of historic Palestine, including a united Jerusalem. The secular
messianism that had been Zionism's creed since its formation in the late
1800s was now supplanted by a religious-territorial messianism whose
major Yisrad objective was securing the unity of Eretz Yisrael. In the
process, the ethos of Labor Zionism, which had been on the decline
throughout the 1960s, was overshadowed.

In the midst of the nationalist euphoria that followed the war, talk
of exchanging newly captured territories for peace had little public
appeal. The Eshkol government followed a two-track policy with respect
to the territories, which would be continued under future Labor
governments: on the one hand, it stated a willingness to negotiate,
while on the other, it laid plans to create Jewish settlements in the
disputed territories. Thus, immediately following the war, Eshkol issued
a statement that he was willing to negotiate "everything" for
a full peace, which would include free passage through the Suez Canal
and the Strait of Tiran and a solution to the refugee problem in the
context of regional cooperation. This was followed in November 1967 by
his acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for
"withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in
the recent conflict" in exchange for Arab acceptance of Israel.
Concurrently, on September 24, Eshkol's government announced plans for
the resettlement of the Old City of Jerusalem, of the Etzion Bloc--
kibbutzim on the Bethlehem-Hebron road wiped out by Palestinians in the
war of 1948--and for kibbutzim in the northern sector of the Golan
Heights. Plans were also unveiled for new neighborhoods around
Jerusalem, near the old buildings of Hebrew University, and near the
Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.

The Arab states, however, rejected outright any negotiations with the
Jewish state. At Khartoum, Sudan, in the summer of 1967, the Arab states
unanimously adopted their famous "three nos": no peace with
Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel concerning
any Palestinian territory. The stridency of the Khartoum resolution,
however, masked important changes that the June 1967 War caused in
inter-Arab politics. At Khartoum, Nasser pledged to stop destabilizing
the region and launching acerbic propaganda attacks against the Persian
Gulf monarchies in exchange for badly needed economic assistance. This
meant that Egypt, along with the other Arab states, would focus on
consolidating power at home and on pressing economic problems rather
than on revolutionary unity schemes. After 1967 Arab regimes
increasingly viewed Israel and the Palestinian problem not as the key to
revolutionary change of the Arab state system, but in terms of how they
affected domestic political stability. The Palestinians, who since the
late 1940s had looked to the Arab countries to defeat Israel and regain
their homeland, were radicalized by the 1967 defeat. The PLO--an
umbrella organization of Palestinian resistance groups led by Yasir
Arafat's Al Fatah--moved to the forefront of Arab resistance against
Israel. Recruits and money poured in, and throughout 1968 Palestinian
guerrillas launched a number of border raids on Israel that added to the
organization's popularity. The fedayeen (Arab guerrillas) attacks
brought large-scale Israeli retaliation, which the Arab states were not
capable of counteracting. The tension between Arab states' interests and
the more revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian resistance
foreshadowed a major inter-Arab political conflict.